Death Magnetic 2

Metallica, I bought your new album yesterday and I must say, it.. is... freaking... AWESOME! This is a huge step up from St. Anger (it makes me squeamish just saying that... St Anger, eughh). There are finally guitar solos! The change of producers has definitely made a big change, so long Bob Rock! They'll hopefully keep Rick Rubin for a long time to come.

The great thing about this is that Metallica has definitely gone back to their roots but I can't say that its quite up there with Master and the Black Album although it's pretty damn close. There's a hint of every Metallica in every song, ...And Justice for all Metallica for instance, can be found on their single "The Day That Never Comes", it follows the same structure of "One", starts quiet and beyond the middle, it's thrash all the way. I get a bit of a Black Album vibe with "Cyanide" it follows more on heavy metal than thrash. Metallica have followed the previous tradition of putting an instrumental song in this album, like "Orion" for Master and "The Call of Ktulu" for Ride the Lightning, by putting in "Suicide and Redemption" 10 minutes of pure 'Tallica. Speaking of Metallica tradition, they have made "The Unforgiven III", it has that distinct Unforgiven sound, slow but heavy. The Lyrical theme of "The Judas Kiss" does sound a lot like Master of Puppets, the line "Bow down, sell your soul to me, I will set you free" does sound like "Come crawling faster, obey your master" and "Master of Puppets I'm pulling your strings".

The album is fairly long despite only having ten songs, their shortest song clocks in at 5:01. The album is definitely a good buy for any Metallica fan, the album starts with That Was Just Your Life and never goes downhill, definitely a breath of fresh air from all the music on the mainstream today.